The ‘Master of Fear’ left his office in 1989 and it has since been preserved for the public to see in all of its hideous, brown glory.
Erich Mielke, former minister of security for the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (East Germany), headed the world’s most fearsome, complex and extensive secret police forces to have ever existed. As part of one of my classes in Germany, I had the privilege to visit his office and better understand the political terror apparatus that was Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry of State Security), or what is more popularly known as the Stasi.
The office is definitely something designed in the 1970’s–it is almost offensive in its parody. It has rooms lined with built-in wood cabinets and wood furniture with dark colored upholstery, and reeks of cigarettes even though it has not been occupied for nearly 40 years. Everything is brown save for a handful of exceptions, exhausting every available shade of the color. For historical purposes, all of the original furniture in the office area has been left as it was.
Now, it is not simply his office that has been preserved. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Stasi fell, too. Once the unification of Germany was completed in 1990, the former headquarters of the Stasi, located at Normannenstraße 20, Berlin, was converted into a museum about the scope and history of the infamous organization.
The Stasi took the effectiveness and notoriety of the Soviet Union’s KGB and said Hold my beer.’ To say the East Germans perfected state surveillance down to a science would be an understatement. There were cameras made for any possible situation that could be hidden in anything from your coat to a fully functioning watering can. If you were suspected of crimes, there was an entire division called Line VIII that would pick the lock of your apartment for investigators to search it for evidence–covertly of course.
Mielke did not just strike fear into the citizenry, but leadership. Mielke would sometimes carry a red briefcase with him to intimidate General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party Erich Honecker, leader of East Germany. This briefcase held a file on Honecker that would expose him for his previous collaboration with the Gestapo. No one was safe from the Stasi’s reach.
Timothy Fitzpatrick can be contacted at
